Back with Beethoven

By ELLIOT RAVETZ

With some 400 recordings of Beethoven's five piano concertos currently listed, even Ludwig's biggest fans must have trouble getting excited about new ones. Except when they are played by Alfred Brendel, an artist whose interpretive mastery of the composer continues to ripen. In his latest release, Beethoven: The 5 Piano Concertos (Philips Classics), Brendel teams with conductor Sir Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic in exhilarating performances that blend vitality, expressive breadth and, particularly in the five slow movements, spellbinding beauty.

Brendel, 68, a longtime London resident of Austrian descent, has recorded works by composers from Bach to Schoenberg. His advocacy of Schubert's late sonatas and many of Liszt's once derided works is widely credited with enhancing the reputations of even these great composers. But it is to Beethoven's works that Brendel has returned most often. In the process he has become the most inspired interpreter of Beethoven's piano music since Artur Schnabel (1882-1951). In addition to the many concert cycles of the 32 sonatas he has played on both sides of the Atlantic, Brendel has recorded both the sonatas and the concertos in each decade since the 1960s.

What prompted this fourth and latest go-round? "A decade is quite a lot in the life of a performer," he says. "On paper--at least in some editions--the works stay the same, but they have to be performed, and they always present new insights. My appreciation of Beethoven has grown, and grows every day." Cementing his decision to re-record them was the prospect of what he now calls an "ideal collaboration" with the Vienna Philharmonic and his friend Simon Rattle, who at 44 is one of the world's most invigorating conductors.

Brendel's playing is distinguished by its heightened intellectual and emotional intensity, by his ability to energize details while sustaining taut lines, by his infallible grasp of musical architecture and by his extraordinary empathy with composers. His performances often achieve a sense of inevitability. Surely, a listener feels, this is what the composer intended.

Take, for instance, the cadenza in the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. Other pianists too often drift from the Classical period provenance of the concerto, when cadenzas were improvised, and play the cadenza with a near seamless bravura that is more suited to the concertos of the Romantic composers, thereby losing its sense of extemporaneous drama--and obscuring many of Beethoven's boldest, and funniest, inspirations. Not Brendel, whose subtle emphases, infinitesimal pauses and canny modulations of tempo, color and dynamics create an air of spontaneous adventure. He reclaims the cadenza's magnificent audacity and evokes Beethoven's imagination at its least inhibited.

Brendel began taking piano lessons when he was six, but he was not a prodigy. He didn't have a steady teacher, or attend a prestigious music conservatory, or possess the kind of breathtaking technical virtuosity that instantly seduces listeners. "After my 16th birthday, I did not have a teacher," he says. "I only went to two or three master classes. So it was a slower development, but it was my own...I'm used to trying to find things out for myself."

While he acknowledges a debt to the great pianists he heard as a young man--Wilhelm Kempff, Alfred Cortot and especially Edwin Fischer, with whom he took his few but inspiring master classes--Brendel claims to have learned more from singers and conductors than from pianists. "I try to understand piano music...[from] the other works of the composers to see what their imagination of sound is like." He also brings to his music a broad range of artistic talents; indeed, he abandoned potential careers in painting and writing in order to play. In 1948, when he made his recital debut in Graz, Austria, a gallery not far from the concert hall featured a one-man exhibition of his paintings.

He has abiding interests in art and architecture, enjoys a taste for absurd humor, kitsch and the cartoons of Edward Gorey and Gary Larson, reads voraciously (in both English and German), and has found the time to write two stimulating, often witty collections of essays about music. Brendel has also discovered a talent for writing poetry--"I'm absolutely startled by it," he says. Eighty of his quite deft poems--variously subversive, surreal, droll, sardonic and whimsical--have just been published in One Finger Too Many (Random House).

But music remains his primary passion. Brendel strives for performances so direct and intimate that audiences can become absorbed in the music and indifferent to his skills. "Sometimes," he says of Beethoven, "one gets the impression that the work is playing itself...that is what I am aspiring to." And that is what he has come close to achieving in these brilliant recordings.

--With reporting by Helen Gibson/London

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London